You can't make this stuff up. Actually you can, but that is only if you plan to publish it exclusively on the Internet, where everything is indisputably true, unless it's not.

A highway project in San Antonio, Texas, is being held up, perhaps forever, because someone discovered a spider where they were digging.

It is a rare spider. So rare, in fact, that until they found it, it was believed to have been extinct.

What is this spider good for, other than holding up highway projects?

No one seems to know, but those rushing to defend it from harm have speculated that perhaps it is a key part of the food chain (in which case the things directly above it in the chain have been very hungry for a long time); or perhaps it may one day hold the key to curing some disease that we don't even know about yet.

In which case, don't hold your breath. The spider that was believed to have been extinct until they found it may now not be merely extinct but really, really extinct. Why? Because it had to be killed and dissected in order to make sure it was the species previously thought to have been extinct.

You got that? They had to kill the spider in order to save it. This sounds curiously like former CNN reporter Peter Arnett who once quoted an anonymous U.S. officer as saying we had to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.

I just “Googled” that Arnett incident in order to refresh my memory.

Such Internet search devices as Google have become second-nature for most of us. They are incredibly helpful tools, so long as one remembers to consider the source and then double-check. It is not true, for instance, that Arnett had to be dissected in order to prove who he was.

Had the present-day Internet been around and been so ubiquitous back in the 1970s, we would never have started the Ask Us column, which ends its long run in the newspaper this coming Wednesday.

Ask Us (we used to capitalize the U and the S because it stood for Union Leader and Sunday News) was a great “information please” device in its day. Writers like Mary Ann Seney and the late Paul and Phyllis Tracy and, most recently, Cat Pragoff spent considerable time and effort, with the aid of helpful public librarians and phone books (remember them?), tracking down reader queries.

Today, our space and resources are focused on helping readers understand what is happening with their tax dollars in Concord or their schools in Manchester or their kids and vaccinations. Questions about extinct spiders or gluten-free recipes, or recipes for gluten-free spiders, we will leave to Mr. Google.

Write to Joe McQuaid at publisher@unionleader.com.